A few months ago I responded to a post concerning universalism on Roger Olson’s blog. What I want to focus on is not the post itself but a discussion in the comments section of the post (N.B. for clarification I have made a couple minor edits of my own comments below without always noting them. The originals can always be found at the link above.)

In responding to another commenter, I contended that, “For many of us, universalism has as much to do with our beginnings as our endings… [viz., that] 1) God created us, as Augustine suggested, in such a way that we can never be truly ‘home’ without Him; 2) Our separation from God is a result of a perversion of our intended orientation; 3) God has the ability, intent, and an eternity’s opportunity to heal everyone to at least get us to the point at which we will recognize Him as perfect goodness and as wholly lovely. At that point, any reasonable, unimpaired soul would willingly embrace the perfect good and wholly lovely. More than ‘hopeful’, it seems to be the only reasonable outcome to expect given those assumptions…”

At which point Olson joined in: “Hopeful expectation, maybe, but not dogmatic knowledge.” On several occasions he has made a sharp distinction between what is taught in Scripture, which becomes a matter of dogma, and that which is reasoned, about which we cannot claim any certainty or undue emphasis.

To this I responded that we should have more than mere hopeful expectation that all will be redeemed because if we posited either that “God could but would not heal an impaired will” or that “He designed creatures that, even once all external encumbrances were removed, would still have a desire to reject the plainly beheld utmost Good,” we would be contradicting descriptions of God that (to use his term) are revealed. Even if we don’t have what he would call dogmatic grounds for universal reconciliation, I proposed that it is at least axiomatic. “But then again,” I noted, “most all of our dogmas are based on interpretations rather than unrefracted revelations.” I wanted to make the last point because his category of “revealed” ends up being vacuous given the human element of interpretation: nothing is “revealed” in Scripture that is not then processed and shaded by human reason.

Olson declined to engage those points, choosing to shift to his most fundamental objection to universalism (that I’ve responded to before): “The larger issue,” said he, “is the relative autonomy required for a real relationship. What you call ‘healing an impaired will’ would amount to coercion.” This free-will objection is probably one of the most commonly raised against universalism.

I tried again: “It really seems you’re saying God would rather have people choose to commune with Him in violation of their own judgment than choose Him because they can accurately perceive His intrinsic goodness and love Him for that sake. If a mind rejects intrinsic goodness, it is the definition of ‘broken’–and being born in this fallen world, how could it not be broken? We’re not talking about some biology lab experiment where God creates lots of tabula rasa entities just to see which ones will choose Him: the teaching on the imago dei paints a very different picture. A God who desires all to come to repentance wouldn’t leave those whose judgment is impaired to their own devices any more than a loving father would be content to watch his mentally handicapped son play with a loaded gun, knowing what will inevitably happen and yet not interfering. The line between coercion and persuasion/coaxing/wooing is not thin at all: coercion entails a violated will, whereas the latter refer to removing hindrances” and revealing how what is already wished for can be fulfilled. “I’m not really talking some monergistic remapping of the mind, but of patient interaction with every yet-viable part of the will. (On the other hand, I don’t know that violating my toddler’s will to run into a busy street is such an unforgivable coercion.)”

I was trying to point out a realization I had that unveiled universalism as the only view I now find coherent. It was an epiphany grounded in two unlikely universalist allies, namely Augustine’s teaching (mentioned above) that man was “made for” God and can only find rest in Him and Luther’s emphasis on the bondage of the will. As I wrote some time ago, “[God] has never made a soul that could become so blind as to be utterly incapable of recognizing Him as Father, and [George] MacDonald doubted to the extreme that there ever existed a soul that would not be irresistibly drawn to Him and His goodness once it did recognize Him. Our wills are bound, bound by our biology, bound by our cultures, habits, and prejudices: what else would a loving Father do but make every effort to free His children from that bondage? ‘The will of God should be done. Man should be free—not merely man as he thinks of himself, but man as God thinks of him’ (MacDonald).”

This week it all came home to me once again as I read Eastern Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart’s unexpected foray into another comments section, this time on Fr. Aidan Kimel’s blog, Eclectic Orthodoxy. After describing himself as a “complete and unreserved universalist”, something that I don’t believe has heretofore been common knowledge, DBH explained that “freedom as defined in a purely voluntarist, spontaneous, atelic movement of the will–pure libertarian freedom…is a logically incoherent model of freedom…”

The classical Platonic-Aristotelian-Christian understanding of freedom is one in which the rational will of necessity, when set free from ignorance, wills the good end of its own nature; and perfect freedom is the power to achieve that end without hindrance. Thus God is perfectly free precisely because he cannot work evil, which is to say nothing can prevent him from realizing his nature as the infinite Good…Since, after all, all employments of the will are teleological–necessarily intentionally directed towards an end, either clearly or obscurely known by the intellect–and since the Good is the final cause of all movements of the will, no choice of evil can be free in a meaningful sense. For evil is not an end, and so can be chosen under the delusion that it is in some sense a good in respect of the soul (even if, in moral terms, one is aware that one is choosing what is conventionally regarded as “evil”); and no choice made in ignorance can be a free choice.

In simple terms, if a deranged man chooses to slash himself with a knife or set fire to himself, you would not be interfering with his “freedom” by preventing him from doing so. You would be rescuing him from his slavery to madness. This is why the free-will defense of the idea of an eternal hell is essentially gibberish.

So the moral of the story (aside from the observation that a lot of the most interesting discussion in the blogosphere comes from the comments section!) is that the libertarian or free-will objection to universalism, at least as commonly formulated, ultimately has no legs.

Now, regarding whether universalism is “revealed” in Scripture and hence eligible to be dogma for folks like Olson, we may soon begin to see progress on that front as well: according to the same comment thread, DBH stated his conviction that universalism is the only coherent way of reading Paul and his intention to write a technical work on the subject. In the meantime, he says he has been chalking up even more evidence of the prevalence of universalism (also called apokatastasis) in the New Testament as he works on a translation that he quips will deserve to be called the “Apokatastatic Standard Version”!

But even if the biblical evidence ends up falling shy of teaching universalism, I cannot see why anyone considering the above arguments has any reason to cling to that still-too-bleak belief in hopeful universalism rather than at least axiomatic universalism, in which no diseased soul can remain unhealed and God must fulfill His destiny of being all in all.